Francis Shor
Associate Professor
Wayne State University
Interdisciplinary Studies Program

Scholars in the developing field of men's studies
have noted the changing definitions of and perspectives
on masculinity and fatherhood (Brod, 1987;
Clatterbaugh, 1990; Franklin, 1984; Hearn, 1992;
Osherson, 1986; Seidler, 1988; Yablonsky, 1990). In
contending with the shape-shifting of fatherhood,
popular culture and the media have become important
sites for ideological reconstitution of patriarchal
relations (Doty, 1993, pp. 41-69; Easthope, 1986; Shor,
1993). Nowhere has this effort at reconstructing
patriarchal relations been more evident than Hollywood.
A recent survey of American films of the 1980's tallied
more than 150 titles that fell under the category of
"father/son" pictures (Rattigan & McManus, p. 15). As
Elizabeth Traube has contended, Hollywood has
reconstructed the image of the father to navigate
through the turbulent waters of gender relations and
patriarchal crisis (Traube, 1992, pp. 123-69).
Traube's approach to the reconfigured gender relations
found in contemporary Hollywood cinema takes account of
the shifting and contested terrain of patriarchy. She
notes that "Patriarchy... is not a monolithic system.
It is a set of practices of domination that vary along
lines of class, race, and ethnicity; and while
patriarchal fictions are centrally produced in the
culture industries, they are received by diverse social
audiences" (p. 167).

Hollywood's pecuniary interest in pandering to
the dreams of diverse social audiences is one reason
that patriarchy is played out in easily resolved family
melodramas. However, below the surface of these
harmless films is the beast of a wounded patriarchy, a
beast whose corporeal image is embodied in the horror
film. According to film historian and critic Vivian
Sobchack (1991), "As the culture changes, as patriarchy
is challenged, as more and more 'families' no longer
conform in structure, membership, and behavior to
the standards set by bourgeois mythology, the horror [End page 60]
film plays out the rage of a paternity denied the
economic and political benefits of patriarchal power"
(p.10) . As another recent study of the horror genre
suggests, "Paternal authority is rarely a solution to
forms of domination within contemporary horror, but
more usually the problem itself" (Jancovich, 1992, p.
85).

In focusing on the contemporary American horror
film, specifically The Shining (1980) and Raising
Cain (1992), I want to explore how the representation
of patriarchal rage in Hollywood cinema may subvert the
cultural construction of patriarchal relations while
reenforcing the longing for a reharmonized patriarchal
order. In other words, given the critical approach of
these two aforementioned films to patriarchy as a
repressive gender privileging, what can
the deconstruction of these films say about the
limitations of the filmmakers and the contradictions of
the historical moment in which these films were
produced? Finally, what does the representation of
patriarchal rage in popular culture say about the level
of violence that continues to plague American
society and what are the implications for efforts to
reconstitute patriarchal relations?

It is evident to many interpreters of the horror
film genre that the problem of patriarchy is central to
the thematics of such films. As one commentator on
the horror film has noted (MacKinnon, 1990), "The
longevity of the horror genre may testify to the
injustice and illness of 'patriarchal' society and its
individual psyches" (p. 105). Another student of the
horror film (Derry, 1987) has identified "an
authoritarian, often crippling parental figure" (p.
164) as a key generic component of the horror film. In
both The Shining and Raising Cain, horror films
that frame an era (1980-1992) of right-wing politics,
an authoritarian parental figure emerges as the beast
within the troubled father protagonist. Before
investigating the sociological and psychological
meanings of the troubled father protagonists in each
film, I want to discuss the sub-genre category of
horror that these films represent.

According to a number of interpreters of the
horror film (Derry, 1987, pp.163-68; and Prawer, 1980,
p. 16), the "horror of personality" has been a major
sub-genre. The "horror of personality" film, seminally
represented in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), explores the
social and psychological conditions of madness and [End page 61]
regressive behavior. In effect, such horror of
personality films touch upon our own sense of
insecurity and self-worth as exposed by the cultural
and social determinants in society. Labelling this
condition post-modern paranoia, Mark Jancovich (1992)
traces the interrelationship between contemporary
horror of personality, the over-regulated society, and
the diminished sense of self (p. 83) . Robin Wood
(1986, pp. 70-73), following the theories of Herbert
Marcuse, sees such horror films as part of the working
out of surplus repression in society.

The psychological dimension of these cultural and
social determinants inheres in the electric connection
(a kind of cathexis from a Freudian perspective)
between reality and the vulnerable self. The shock
effect comes with "the full terror of the experience of
the world as liable at any moment to crash in and
obliterate all identity" (Laing, 1970, p. 45). This
effect, designated as implosion by the psychologist R.
D. Laing, is a representative form of the divided self.
Laing's insights on schizophrenia and the shattering of
a coherent personality are not only relevant to the
modern horror film, but also, more specifically, to the
"horror of personality" sub-genre represented by The
Shining and Raising Cain.

While The Shining involves a repressed
patriarchal doppleganger as the beast within the
schizophrenic protagonist father, Raising Cain
explores the multiple personalities created by an
authoritarian father. Both films raise questions about
the social and cultural determinants motivating the
horror of personality of the protagonists. In
addition, both films reflect and refract the particular
perspectives of their respective directors, Stanley
Kubrick and Brian De Palma, and their own working out
of the social imaginary that informs their visions.
Finally, both directors provide specific cinematic
configurations of the problematics of patriarchy in
America and of the ideological meanings of the
contemporary horror of personality film.

The father protagonist of Kubrick's The Shining
is Jack Torrance, an unemployed teacher and erstwhile
writer. Torrance (played with malevolent
eyebrow-arching perfection by Jack Nicholson) brings
his family (his wife, Wendy, and psychic son, Danny) to
a posh and isolated summer resort where he assumes the
responsibilities of winter caretaker while working on
his writing projects. Haunted by the ghost of his own
and the hotel's patriarchal past, Torrance slips into [End page 62]
madness and regression. This madness and regression
releases a monstrous schizophrenic masculine other that
stalks both his wife and child until his physical
demise in the snowbound maze outside the hotel.

On a sociological level, Torrance himself is
stalked by the cultural demons of success and status
that highlight his own marginalized social existence as
a failure. His denial of impending failure and blaming
of wife and child not only reflect the dynamics of the
contemporary patriarchal crisis, but also become
the basis for the projections and fantasies which
conjure up cinematic images of supernatural and
invidious forces conspiring against him. "The occult
motif" argue Ryan and Kellner (1988), "brings together
a number of social themes - male rage against wife and
child resulting from economic failure, the emergence of
violence from past guilt, and the more conservative
idea of the inefficacy of civil institutions in the
face of the evil in human nature" (p. 173).

Kubrick's cinematic construction of the occult
motif allows for embedding a social imaginary that
repeats a fixed-idea present in his other films from
2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon:
primitive and aggressive human beings cannot be
contained by the decorous civility of society (Ryan and
Kellner, p.174). More specific to The Shining is
Kubrick's effort to use the horror story to show, in
his own words, "the archetypes of the unconscious"
(Nelson, 1982, p. 197). In effect, the "narrative
structure of The Shining involves a journey from an
ordered and forward-moving world of time into the
disorders of self and regression of memory" (Nelson,
1982, p. 210).

On a psychological level, the subtle hints we are
given about Jack's repressed violence provide a basis
for his "descent into the maelstrom" of madness. The
storm signals become increasingly evident as Torrance
dives further into his own isolation, separating
himself from his wife and child and losing his sense of
connectedness and ontological security in the process.
Torrance demands that his own space (the magnificent
lobby of the hotel) be considered inviolate in a scene
where he violently upbraids his wife for her intrusion
into his work room. Torrance's resentful protection of
this inner sanctum is a reflection of the desire for
patriarchal control and Kubrick's cinematic
construction of the mazelike self-enclosure that
Torrance oversees throughout the film (Nelson, 1982,
pp. 205-7). In a scene which becomes the turning point [End page 63]
for the schizophrenic shattering of Jack's mind, his
wife Wendy attempts to comfort Jack after he awakes
from a howling ni.htmlare. Confessing in slobbery
fashion that he has dreamed that he killed her and
their son Danny, Jack no longer can prevent the return
of the repressed that marks both contemporary horror
and patriarchal rage. When Danny appears a short time
later with a mark on his neck, Wendy accuses Jack of
deliberately hurting him, recalling a time several
years before when a drunken Jack dislocated Danny's
arm.

With Wendy fleeing with her traumatized son, Jack
retreats into the hotel's ghostly past and his own
regressive impulses at the bar of the magnificent Gold
Room. Looking first directly into the camera and then
at the bartender Lloyd, Torrance entreats the viewer
and Lloyd to sympathize with his desire to return
to a "masculine freedom and violence, one in which [he]
no longer represses either the sexist urge to demean
Wendy... or his selfish resentment toward the moral
demands of fatherhood" (Nelson, 1982, p. 223). Calling
on the bartender to "set 'em up, and I'll knock 'em
down," Torrance resentfully recalls the incidents of
his past that previously weighed down his guilty
consciousness. Free to explore what he has repressed
and to give vent to monstrous patriarchal urges, Jack
vehemently describes to Lloyd what happened when he
injured Danny years before: "The little fucker had
thrown all my papers on the floor. All I tried to do
was pull him up." Although claiming to "love the little
son-of-a bitch," Jack's violent denial of any
deliberate wrong-doing belies the malevolent intentions
he harbors towards his son and wife.

When Wendy next tries to enlist Jack in helping
find what has traumatized Danny, he flies off the
handle and accuses her of undermining his masculine
prerogatives. ("I've let you fuck up my life so far,
but I'm not going to let you fuck this up.") Returning
to the Gold Room, Jack encounters Delbert Grady, a
butler whose caretaker double, Charles Grady, killed
his two daughters and wife in the Overlook Hotel years
before. When Grady accidently spills the yellow
liqueur Advocaat on Jack, they retire to the red
adorned bathroom where Grady reveals his own anal and
punitive patriarchal past. Warning Jack against the
unholy trinity of the "nigger cook" (Danny's outside
psychic connection), his "willful son," and
"interfering" wife, Grady recounts how he "corrected"
both his wife and daughters when they tried "to prevent
me from doing my duty." [End page 64]

Fortified by the unleashing of the repressed
monstrous male, Jack once again confronts Wendy in the
massive hotel lobby. She has just finished looking
through his typed manuscript of page after page of the
single sentence: "All work and no play make Jack a dull
boy." At this point, skillfully punctuated by atonal
music, we understand that Jack has literally gone mad.
Jack's fall into madness, a symptom of the
"discontinuity in the temporal self" (Laing, 1970,
p. 109), is a consequence of the implosion of his
personality from more unreal spaces like the Gold Room
to the claustrophobic contractions in the pantry and
the final rampage in his family's bedroom and bathroom.

Before this final implosion, Jack explodes upon
finding Wendy reading his manuscript and stalks her
saying that he does not intend to hurt her, only to
"bash in [her] fucking brains." Wendy manages to
prevent the leering and charging monstrous male that
Jack has become from grabbing her with the use of a
phallic and culturally significant baseball bat. After
knocking him out and dragging him into the pantry,
Wendy takes one of the large kitchen knives and returns
to Danny and the sanctuary of their family room. Jack
is eventually released by a taunting Grady who inquires
whether he has the "belly" for dealing "with the matter
in the harshest possible way." This reactionary drive
for sadistic discipline and punishment underscores the
patriarchal rage in the film and the politics of the
right-wing of the post-Vietnam period (Ryan and
Kellner, 1988, pp. 177-8). When Jack takes up an ax to
wreck revenge on his wife and son, he is attempting to
redeem through violence his paternal privileges
(Sobchack, 1991, p. 10).

The revenge that Jack attempts to wreck on his
wife and son is psychologically more complicated and
less Freudian than either Kubrick or some of the
critics of the film project. The explosion of
repressed anger and aggression manifested by Jack is
certainly exacerbated by sexual frustration and oedipal
guilt. However, the rage that Jack exhibits is as much
a form of psychotic assertiveness and regressive
transformation that the psychologist Heinz Kohut (1977)
sees not "as a primary given - an 'original sin,'
requiring expiation, a bestial drive that has to be
'tamed' - but as a specific regressive phenomenon - a
psychological fragment isolated by the breakup of a
more comprehensive psychological configuration and thus
dehumanized and corrupted" (p. 124). Jack's troubled
fatherhood is thus not only the return of the
repressed, but also a situational psychopathology that [End page 65]
defines the egocentric and paranoid father in
competitive, post-modern America (Yablonsky, 1990,
pp. 81-82; and Jancovich, 1992, pp. 83-86).

The final engulfment and implosion that overcome
Jack during his murderous assault against Wendy and
Danny reveal the extent to which the horror of
personality interfaces with a patriarchal rage. While
some evil spirit may be invading Jack's body in the
form of the repressed patriarchal past, the comic
transcoding of that domestic past ("Wendy, I'm home!"
and "Here's Johnny!" sequences) suggests that it is not
possible to go home again without some implausible
gothic regression (whether that home is in the 1950's
setting of the tv sitcom, Father Knows Best, or the
1920's to which Kubrick's Jack Torrance spiritually
escapes). The tragic elements of Jack's hysterical
rampage are the ultimate consequences of a narcissistic
wounding and ontological despair confronting
masculinity in America. While the murderous pursuit of
his wife and son reminds us of the ubiquitous
aggression which Kubrick after Freud seems to suggest
in this and earlier films, there is also the intimation
that the reciprocal relationships, which human beings
must engage in and which engender empathy, require a
sense of equality, respect, and openness foreign to
patriarchy. The difficulty of achieving these
qualities in either parental or conjugal relationships
underscores our own potential "horror of personality."
Jack's final chase through the snow-bound maze of
hedges results in both literal and figurative
petrification. The ultimate outcome of Jack's
anxieties and psychological disintegration is
pinpointed by R.D. Laing (1970) in his analysis of the
consequences of engulfment and implosion: "being turned
from a man with subjectivity to a thing, a mechanism, a
stone, an it, being petrified" (p. 75).

If The Shining demonstrates that a monstrous
repressed patriarchal rage is just below the surface
of the more traditional male chauvinist character like
Jack Torrance, then Raising Cain suggests that even a
more liberated and nurturing father, Carter Nix, can
regress to a murderous male. However, unlike the
doubled Jack Torrance whose absent father is replaced
by the ghostly punitive patriarch Grady, Carter Nix is
deliberately split into multiple personalities by a
real controlling and authoritarian father whose re-
appearance after a twenty year absence sends Carter
into a schizophrenic episode that results in assault,
murder, and child-kidnapping, the very messy stuff of
patriarchal rage and its popular culture [End page 66]
representations.

Raising Cain clearly critiques the obsession
with patriarchal control, especially as it relates to
paternal prerogatives. The villainous character of Dr.
Nix (performed as part of a multiple-role tour-de-force
by John Lithgow) is condemned as a rather crazed
scientist who deliberately subjected his own child to
various traumas in order to induce multiple
personalities. Compounding his heinous crime against
his own son, Dr. Nix is once more (returning to America
and his son after a 20 year exile and assumed death in
Norway) engaged in a scheme to kidnap children for his
child development experiments. Clearly, on one level,
the character of Dr. Nix is reminiscent of the mad male
scientists, or, perhaps the less-crazed Skinnerian
behaviorists, who are (or were) able to hide behind
their abstractions and fetishizing of reason as a way
to establish a patriarchal hegemony. As one critic of
De Palma's films contends, "the true fathers in his
world are the abstract forces of masculine technocracy"
(Graham, 1987, p. 142).

Although the character of Carter Nix does not
exhibit the same level of male chauvinism or masculine
arrogance as his father, he, nonetheless, continues the
tradition of surveillance and control of his child,
albeit with more of a new age sensibility. In fact,
the film opens with a shot of a television monitor
showing Carter Nix in bed comforting his young
daughter. Furthermore, Carter is shown in an opening
sequence arguing with a women friend (whose child he is
about to kidnap) that controlling early child
development is essential to creating a wholesome
personality. Carter's own compulsiveness with his
daughter Amy (commented on later in the film by his
wife) belie his ostensible nurturing concerns,
suggesting a disturbed personality.

The disturbed, schizophrenic, and multiple
personality is at the center of the narrative structure
of Raising Cain and integral to De Palma's style and
message in this and numerous earlier films. We first
meet what we understand to be Carter's evil twin Cain
as Carter is prepared to chloroform a woman friend and
steal her son away for his father's experiment. Every
time Cain appears and is seen by Carter, he is shot at
the kind of camera angle made popular in the film noir
style. It is only later in the film that we understand
Cain to be one of Carter's multiple personalities. In
fact, Cain is a representation of the monstrous and
horrific return of the repressed. When we see Cain in [End page 67]
a sequence with Dr. Nix, Cain claims that even though
Dr. Nix made him what he is, no "cages" could hold him.
Like the explosion of the repressed id in the character
of Jack Torrance in The Shining, Cain Nix represents
the murderous patriarchal past re-emerging to wreck
vengeance on women and children.

Cain's appearances in Raising Cain are
triggered when Carter is confronted with repressed
fears and fantasies, not unlike the psychiatrist in
De Palma's earlier and controversial film Dressed to
Kill. Although Raising Cain also shares with
Dressed to Kill (and Psycho) a voyeuristic link
between sex and death, the female and maternal
character of Jenny does not die as a consequence of her
sexual transgression, even though she suffers guilt
about the affair and dreams of being lanced through her
heart by a statue of a knight in shining armor! When
Carter sees his wife in the throes of passion with her
former boyfriend, Cain emerges to take over the
diabolical plot to frame the boyfriend for a murder he
is planning to commit. However, in a confounding of
the murder of Jenny and the narrative structure of the
film, Jenny returns from the marsh where she was
presumed drowned. (The sequence where the car
containing Jenny and the other woman is pushed into a
marsh by Cain/Carter recalls Norman Bates effort to get
rid of Marian Crane's car in Psycho. Although both
cars eventually sink, the agonizingly slow descent into
the marsh and the alarming awakening of Jenny in the
sinking car in Raising Cain showcases De Palma's
baroque cross-cutting thriller style.) First
re-appearing on the tv monitor in Amy's bedroom after
Carter/Cain watches the news confirming her murder and
disappearance, Jenny successfully and suspensefully
attacks Carter/Cain, slashing his wrist and holding him
down until the detectives arrive.

Although Jenny exhibits certain independence and
strength not found in earlier De Palma films (e.g.,
Dressed to Kill), she is not able to rescue her child
by herself or even to be free of Carter's alter ego.
In an amazing narrative switch that ironically
transcodes the transvestite role of the woman
victimizer in Dressed to Kill, the maternal protector
of Carter's multiple personalities, Margo, emerges in a
session with a wig-headed former psychologist colleague
of Dr. Nix. Stealing her wig, Carter/Margo returns to
the motel where Dr. Nix is staying followed first by
Jenny and then later by the detectives and Jenny's
boyfriend Jack, all of whom will figure in the
multilayered slow-motion brilliant cinematic climax of [End page 68]Raising Cain. In a scene that recalls any number of
previous De Palma and Hitchcock films, the knife
wielding Margo kills Dr. Nix. As he slumps over, he
drops Amy, who he had been cradling in his arms, from
the third floor of the motel into the arms of the new
surrogate paternal figure Jack. Jack's rescue of Amy
from the fall is aided by an errant gunshot from the
dying Dr. Nix when the shot sheers off a spear that was
about to impale Jack.

With all of the obvious phallic symbols, including
the phallicized and castrating female figure of Margo,
it might be easy to interpret Margo as a reprise of the
transsexual in Dressed to Kill (MacKinnon, 1990,
pp.150-55). However, Margo as the maternal id or
(m)other of Carter's multiple personality is not an
essential transsexual or even the castrating female id
of an earlier De Palma film, Sisters (Creed, 1993,
pp.131-38). In fact, Margo is the alter ego of Carter.
In order for Carter to free himself of his father's
tyranny and rescue his own childhood, as well as become
the instrument in rescuing his daughter, he must become
the maternal (m)other. Moreover, although there are
elements of the castrating female hero, as evident in
Wendy in The Shining and in other horror films
(Creed, 1993, pp. 158-63), there is some ambiguity
about the final triumphant personality of Carter,
especially in the coda in Raising Cain (a stylistic
staple of De Palma horror films, i.e. Carrie,
Dressed to Kill, etc.) where Carter appears fully
crossed-dressed. Whether Margo is ultimately
malevolent or benevolent is part of the open style of
De Palma's horror films.

While Raising Cain certainly opens up the
possibility of a post-patriarchal future, it remains
submerged in the patriarchal rage to which it so
brilliantly calls attention. On one level, Raising
Cain fulfills the insight of Vivian Sobchack (1991)
about the lack of "narrative resolution for patriarchy
in the horror film - except the denial or death of the
father, finally impotent and subject to the present
power of his own horrific past" (p. 27). On another
level, De Palma is doomed to be caught between his own
critique of patriarchy and his inability either
stylistically or ideologically to embrace a
post-patriarchal future. As Allison Graham (1987)
points out: "[De Palma's] horror... becomes self
perpetuating: in an atrophied inner world, only
monstrosities can grow, but only the release of these
monstrosities can destroy the forces that engendered
them.... De Palma's films, in fact, reveal a [End page 69]
consciousness politically stranded at the crossroads of
critique and ideology, terrified by the power of a
deadly consensus reality, yet equally mortified by the
prospect of violent change, and the horror they reflect
becomes a documentary vision of our historical moment"
(p. 141).

In Raising Cain De Palma constructs a cinematic
vision of the horror of personality which clearly
recognizes the historical moment in which post-Vietnam
America and its patriarchal crisis is ensnared. It
seems obvious that the diabolical Dr. Nix of Raising
Cain is a cinematic analogue to the nefarious Richard
Nixon. Like Dr. Nix, Nixon traumatized a generation of
young people in his perpetuation of the war in
Southeast Asia and the attendant repression at home
against political dissidents. Moreover, Nixon's
resignation after the disgrace of Watergate, like Dr.
Nix's exile after being charged with kidnapping
children, represents not only the failure of certain
arrogant men, but an indictment of the patriarchal
order that used its sons as sacrificial lambs to the
gods of their own mad designs. The reappearance of Dr.
Nix and the right-wing repressive patriarchal politics
represented by Nixon in the figures of Reagan/Bush
suggest for De Palma a need to expose the patriarchal
past. Yet, as a number of critics contend (Rattigan &
McManus, 1992; Ryan & Kellner, 1988; and Traube, 1992),
Hollywood's efforts to restore or reconfigure a
benevolent patriarchy is compromised by the unresolved
contradictions of the past. Moreover, as a final
commentary on the horror of personality integral to the
films discussed and to the patriarchal crisis of the
historical moment, Lynda Boose (1993) convincingly
writes: "For America's post-Vietnam narrative is
stamped with the intensity of a generation stuck in its
own boyhood and now playing out, with increasing
violence, an unconscious cultural myth that attempts to
recover the father.... The quest for the father - which
might seem to be a reparative ideal - is dangerously
regressive and invariably futile because what was
required at the time of transition to adulthood cannot,
by very definition, be incorporated twenty years later"
(pp. 602 & 604).

That De Palma and Kubrick are able to reveal the
danger in the regressive quest to restore the
patriarchal past is a testament to the power of their
cinematic visions and the horror of personality genre.
Nonetheless, identifying the beast as merely the return
of the repressed neglects the on-going divided self
that plagues both America and American men. If we can [End page 70]
admit that father no longer knows best, especially when
promoting an outmoded patriarchal order, then perhaps
we can escape from the ni.htmlares that populate both
the American horror of personality film and America
itself.